My friend Magoo is using toggl for time tracking and decided to give it a go. I usually apply pomodoros when I am programming, but although they are ok to keep me focused in the task at hand, I don’t like the fact that after they are gone I don’t have any way to keep track of what I was doing (because the reality is that I usually get interrupted and have to jump to some other project at least for some minutes)

My first impression wasn’t the best, it looked like an early version of a promising tool but still rough in every sense, but after adding some workspaces, clients and projects it started to look more usable.

When I realised that they have an Android client, a desktop version, and a Chrome integration that can be used inside Trello my respect grew a lot more.

I don’t think it will be the last tool I try for the task (there are things that I am still missing), but it is a lot better than any other option I have tried.

For some time I have been using gitignore.io to create the .gitignore file used in my projects.

The content in many cases seems to be overkill (because it includes common libraries used by the language or tools selected), but it is better than the option of accidentally adding files to git that later need to be removed.

I am working in an application that has to access a good number of resource files (good both in numbers and file sizes). As usual I am working in a Vagrant instance, and everything was going fine for the initial work.

But eventually the number of files passed from just testing to production, and while developing in my host the file access operation was ok (in the order of seconds to load everything), when the same code was running in Vagrant it took more than ten minutes to be ready.

At first I thought it was a memory problem, and increasing it to 6GB helped a bit (nine minutes instead of ten), it still didn’t cut.

I tried creating an instance in AWS, and surprising enough the performance was similar to running in my Mac.

I decided to copy all the files to the Vagrant instance, and then the problem was sorted, performance is on par with the host and AWS. That was it. Looking at the documentation, I noticed a shared directory option that is rsync, but I haven’t tried it, because I wrote a set of scripts that take care of preparing those resources to be deployed (both in Amazon and Vagrant) and dropping them on destination (which is a nice addition to my attempts to automate as much as I can both in development and deployment).